12.  In 1987 the applicant association published a book entitled Euskadi at war. There were four versions – Basque, English, Spanish and French – and the book was distributed in numerous countries, including France and Spain. According to the applicant association, this was a collective work containing contributions from a number of academics with specialist knowledge of the Basque Country and giving an account of the historical, cultural, linguistic and socio-political aspects of the Basque cause. It ended with a political article entitled “Euskadi at war, a promise of peace” by the Basque national liberation movement.
13.  The book was published in the second quarter of 1987. On 29 April 1988 a ministerial order was issued by the French Ministry of the Interior under section 14 of the Law of 29 July 1881, as amended by the decree of 6 May 1939, banning the circulation, distribution and sale of the book in France in any of its four versions on the ground that “the circulation in France of this book, which promotes separatism and vindicates recourse to violence, is likely to constitute a threat to public order”. On 6 May 1988, pursuant to the aforementioned order, the département director of the airport and border police refused to allow over two thousand copies of the book to be brought into France.
14.  On 1 June 1988 the applicant association lodged an administrative appeal against the ban. When this was implicitly rejected, it appealed to the Pau Administrative Court on 29 November 1988.
15.  The Administrative Court held that it did not have jurisdiction and so referred the case to the Conseil d’Etat. By a decision of 9 January 1991 the President of the Judicial Division of the Conseil d’Etat remitted the case to the Pau Administrative Court.
16.  In a judgment delivered on 1 June 1993 after a public hearing in the presence of both parties, the Pau Administrative Court rejected the applicant association’s appeal on the following grounds:
“It has been established that the book at issue entitled Euskadi at war was printed in Spain, that four of its five chapters were written by authors of Spanish nationality and that the documentation used for the preparation of the publication was mainly of Spanish origin. Therefore, and notwithstanding the fact that the book was published by the applicant association, which is based in Bayonne, the offending book must be regarded as of foreign origin within the meaning of the aforementioned provisions. Accordingly, the Minister of the Interior was legally entitled to prohibit the book’s circulation, distribution and sale.
In taking the view that the book at issue could pose a threat to public order since it argued, particularly in Chapter 4, that the violence of the Spanish State justified the ETA terrorist organisation’s ‘proportionate counter-offensive’, the Minister of the Interior did not make any obvious error in assessing the evidence.
Under Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, ‘[e]veryone has the right to freedom ...’; it is the task of the administrative courts to assess whether any restriction of the freedom of expression guaranteed by the above-mentioned Article 10 is proportionate to the legitimate aim being pursued and to assess whether the ban on a publication of foreign origin is in keeping with that aim. In the instant case the evidence does not show that the general prohibition of the book at issue was disproportionate to the public-order objectives being pursued ...”
17.  The applicant association lodged an appeal against this judgment with the Conseil d’Etat on 20 August 1993. In its further observations, it asked the Conseil d’Etat to find that section 14 of the Law of 29 July 1881, as amended, was incompatible with Articles 10 and 14 of the Convention taken together.
18.  On 9 July 1997 the Conseil d’Etat ruled that section 14 of the Law of 1881, as amended, was not incompatible with Articles 10 and 14 of the Convention on the following grounds:
“Under section 14 of the Law of 29 July 1881, as amended by the decree of 6 May 1939, ‘the circulation, distribution or sale in France of newspapers or texts written in a foreign language, whether periodicals or not, may be prohibited by a decision of the Minister of the Interior. Newspapers and texts of foreign origin written in French and printed abroad or in France may also be prohibited’. In the absence of any statutory provision establishing the conditions circumscribing the legality of decisions taken on the basis of this provision, any restrictions of the Minister’s power derive from the need to reconcile the general interests for which he is responsible with the respect due to public freedoms, particularly freedom of the press. When an appeal against such a prohibition order is lodged with an administrative court, it is duty-bound to assess whether the banned publication poses such a threat to these general interests that it warrants an infringement of public freedoms. Contrary to the applicant association’s assertions, the power thus exercised by the Minister of the Interior, under the supervision of the courts, is not incompatible with the combined provisions of Articles 10 and 14 of the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms …”
19.  On the other hand, the Conseil d’Etat quashed the judgment and the ministerial order of 29 April 1988 on the following grounds:
“By the impugned order, the Minister of the Interior prohibited the circulation, distribution and sale of the collective work Euskadi at war, which must be viewed as a written text of foreign origin within the meaning of the aforementioned section 14 of the Law of 29 July 1881. Having regard to the interests that the Minister is responsible for protecting, in particular public safety and public order, the Court finds that the content of this publication does not provide sufficient legal justification for the serious infringement of press freedom embodied in the impugned decision.
It follows from the above considerations that the Association Ekin has good grounds for maintaining that the Pau Administrative Court was wrong to reject, by means of the impugned judgment, the association’s application to set aside the decision of 29 April 1988, taken on the basis of the aforementioned section 14 of the Law of 29 July 1881, by which the Minister of the Interior prohibited the circulation, distribution, and sale in France of the book entitled Euskadi at war, published by the association ...”
20.  In a registered letter with recorded delivery received by the Ministry of the Interior on 2 December 1997, the applicant association presented the Minister with a claim for compensation for the pecuniary and non-pecuniary damage caused by the application of the unlawful order of 29 April 1988 for more than nine years. According to the applicant association, the implementation of this order amounted to tortious conduct on the part of the authority. It estimated the overall losses it had sustained at 831,000 French francs (FRF), including FRF 481,000 resulting from the financial loss deriving directly from the prohibition of sales of the book throughout France. To date it has not had any reply from the Minister of the Interior. Under the rules of French administrative proceedings, this silence counts as a refusal of the applicant association’s claim.